


(not every love burns.)

by carlemon



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon - Book, Comfort No Hurt, Established Relationship, Foreshadowing, M/M, Mike Leaves Derry, Post-Canon Fix-It, Stanley Uris Does Not Take A Bath, To An Extent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 16:37:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13462209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlemon/pseuds/carlemon
Summary: Richmond, 1978. (No rest for good men either, it seems.)Mike is woken by a nightmare.





	(not every love burns.)

**Author's Note:**

> title from **a softer world: 1210** (which is actually one of my favourites for this ship)
> 
> i want to carve our initials in the bark of everyone who ever hurt you.  
>  _(not every love burns.)_

_He had seen it and he had gone on with his life; he had integrated the memory into his view of the world. He was still young enough so that view was tremendously wide. But what had happened that day had nonetheless haunted his mind’s darker corners, and sometimes in his dreams he ran from that grotesque bird as it printed its shadow on him from above. Some of these dreams he remembered and some he did not, but they were there, shadows which moved by themselves._

(Stephen King, _IT)_

 _At dawn my lover comes to me_  
_And tells me of her dreams_  
_With no attempts to shovel the glimpse_  
_Into the ditch of what each one means_

(Bob Dylan, _Gates of Eden)_

_Richmond, VA. 1978._

Of course the one time the alarm’s working he wakes on his own, _slowly_ , sleep fleeing him in fistfuls: Mike’s up, staring at the ceiling at twenty to six approximately. (No rest for good men either, it seems.) The last dregs of his dream (a dream, he reasons with some mild dread, that'd in fact been only _half_ a dream; an awful, stinging dream of late summer and the full-fecund- _humid_ hymns of cicadas and of mosquitoes) chase him, hot on his heels as he swings himself off the bed, reluctant to release his tight handfuls of Egyptian linen. The empty space on the other side of the bed that greets him when he flails a palm out would be foreboding, maybe, if it hadn’t been neatened to immaculate smoothness underneath his desperate, sweaty grip, evidence enough that all's right in the world, all’s fine, Stan’s just—

 _Just_.

He gathers himself in a rush, kicking on his slippers. _Stan’s just,_ he thinks, and stops himself. They’re just— _it’s been a busy week, it’s been cold, did I forget to put the chickens away?_ All’s fine. Stan’s up early, just a little early. Nevertheless—

It’s not even six.

 _(That’s one hell of an early start, isn’t it?_ Never mind that he knows, and Stan knows that he knows, et _cetera_ , Stan likes his days to proceed a certain way, at certain times and intervals, et _cetera_ , has he even missed _bathtime_ in all of the ten years they’ve been living together? _Should I be worried?_ Mike wonders. _You bet,_ chortles a funny half-wheedling, pleasant voice, _you bet, you bet your_ fur _, like they all used to say—)_

They’d just re-carpeted all of the second floor and so he walks in ominous silence, hands out to steady himself against the vague shapes looming from the dark. Past his study where discarded manuscripts lie asprawl in damp darkened nooks and crannies he shuffles, past Stan’s alcove for reading and chess, the walk-in closet filled to burst with birding equipment and pairs of old binoculars neither had the heart to toss, past the room they’d jokingly named the dog’s and had actually given to Chips Junior for her to be left to her own devices in. He gives the mutt (a little Jack Russell with a heart of a child he'd fallen irreversibly in love with, for which Stan liked to draw long, scented baths in autumntime) a little pet before he continues on his way, scrubbing the space between her woolly ears; she stirs, but only briefly.

—Not much else does. (He feels a little like an invader in his own home, his mere existence a disturbance of the otherwise perfect still life captured around him.) Muted by slumberous weight, Mike moves through the peachy morning light, sneaking in and out of shadows, half-afraid of the open, quiet spaces that hollow out before him. The half-dream, half-nightmare opens like a flower in each of them; in a haze, here, the whisper of _beep-beep, Mikey, wakey wakey, Mikey, it’s morning Mikey you have cattle to feed sheep to shoot mud to roll in so wake up, Mikester, you better—_

 _You shut it,_ he tells it tiredly and breaches with a harsh, shuddering breath the kitchen. Across their pristine lino countertops dance flickery spiders of light, dispersing when Mike’s slow hand drags into their brilliant caper. Though they've just entered wintertime everything smells of Virginia in summer, of pollen, humidity, dust and damp earth. Though his nightshirt sticks to his shoulders (the collar itchy-clingy at his throat) it’s certainly not hot enough for the flickering image at the end of the kitchen to be a mirage.

The unforgiving July heat calls for him. Mike darts out a tongue, licks dry lips, bare feet heavy.

He tries “Stan?” and his heart is thrown back where it belongs, down his throat, behind his ribs.

“Mike?”

 _Everything’s okay,_ he thinks suddenly to himself, startled slightly by how feverishly the thought occurs to him. _Everything’s fine._

* * *

They’ve both been having trouble sleeping recently. Part of it’s the heat— Stan’d flown over _(home)_ to Maine half a year back just a little after winter for (what? For what, because even now neither of them don’t quite— _know)_ some kind of Young Accountants’ Counsel. (He’d snickered out the words precisely like that when it’d mailed for him one dreary afternoon, like each one had a life of its own and these lives were haughty and self-important and _capitalised_ like so, _Yung Accuhntants’ Cuhnsel,_ promptly sending himself into hysterics.) Mike had waited, and it’d all been well and good, absolutely hunky dory, until he’d come back and brought the unnatural cold of Bangor back with him.

—Or, the memory of cold. Mike'd held him sometimes at night and figured— figured he could _feel_ the lingering suggestion of frosty nights spent in bluedark, breathing into his fists and watching the pale play of light through the crack under the door. Stan’d gone _(back)_ to Bangor and taken a little piece of it back with him, fleetingly infinitesimal, for sure, but unmistakeable in its presence nonetheless. Some days it’s a ghost, some days an actual presence.

Mike hasn’t been scared for a long while— once of the cancer eating up his father’s insides, _chewing_ and _spitting_ (making _mincemeat_ of, even, _eating_ and _ravaging, destroying)_ and _digesting_ ; once of (and here memory fails him, skipping over the parameters where reality bleeds into fiction like his strange, strange dream) birds, the curl of smoke accompanied by strange scaly featherdown into the air.

He’s a little scared (but only sometimes) of the moments in which Stan succumbs to whatever he brought home with him.

Or— maybe succumb isn’t the right word. _Chances upon_ , he amends, _that’s better. That’s more like it._ Like he’ll be deseeding peppers as Stan sets the table, Chipsy Junior winding around their legs (Stan sighing with feigned dismay and doing a little hop-skip around her path, his sigh of “She’s going to _kill_ me, Mike. If I trip, I’ll _die_ ,” searing a smile into Mike’s cheeks scuffed raw by heat and grass) and suddenly It _(what?)_ will fall upon them, and Mike will be cloaked in prickly evening dark even though the flash of light off his paring knife will suddenly be too bright, too _dazzling_ , to bear, and

Stan’s eyes will go wide as if the unfathomable _wrongness_ of that feeling, of the unnamed _It_ , had just then struck him upside the chin, and they’ll spend the night eating quietly, strangely comforted by each’s proximity to the other, as if with their closeness they’re discussing at length a secret neither knows how to articulate.

(He’s come close, close to willing it into comprehensible existence before, not in words, no, but in images and events, _memories_. See: the brush of wool across his legs, the flash of light off a trombone, the friendly weight of his grandfather’s old bolt-gun in its holster over his shoulder. He’s come close, _but_. Maybe some things are better left unsaid.)

(In between manuscripts he writes them absentmindedly with his thumbs across his forearms, in between crosses that sting despite the tenderness of the touch.)

That secrecy’s a heavy cloak as he comes up to Stan sitting cross-legged on a sofa too small for him in front of their big bay-window, an indiscernible shape of finely-crafted angles in an open-collared shirt. Stan, lovely Stanley Uris who wrestled over leases with him when they'd rented their first house, who insisted on fireworks on the fourth and fairy lights on Hannukah, for _chucks;_ _(for chucks indeed,_ thinks Mike, _but where the hell had we gotten_ that? _Chucks, chucks,_ chucks _—_ who had it been who had first crowed that they GET THEIR CHUCKS _RIIIIGHT_ HERE! in an outburst of delight and frenzy they’d laughed so freely and easily to?) Stan perpetually offended by their flooding gutters and overgrown privets, his clipped, precise, edges fitting (without having to fold or bend or _break)_ into Mike’s open-armed warmth and against his broad chest. Stan who shrieks

_(SCREAMS)_

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE GET OUT _HIT THE ROAD, JACK!”_

in Mike’s darker dreams of nausea and sewer-smell and mould squelching not under but _into_ the gaps between his toes, Stan who'd shied from the darkness of their basement back in Jersey. Mike rests a hand at the junction between his shoulder and neck, fingers curving into the familiar space made by his jutting collarbones, squeezes. Stan’s gentle, bird-boned features emerge from the growing light, and

(and for a second Mike _recognises_ , with mild intrigue and mild humour—”It’s sort of early to be birding, you know, come back to bed,”— and stark black _terror,_ the gentle froth of _feathers_ peeking from around his collar, as if drawing a noose to warn off Mike’s ministrations— or, he _thinks_ he recognises, because just like that the sensation is gone and Stan’s neck is all warm skin and bobbing adam’s apple again)

as Mike draws close he smiles, the adoring in its curvature both learned and immediate. Mike’s hands hover at the back of his seat; his nose, at the bare space where his hand’d been, careful. The day’s barely broken; the air still thick, unreceptive to affection and familiarity and banter. Stan darts him the beginnings of a smile simultaneously rueful and wry, trembling slightly at the corners; Mike wants to smooth it away, hook his thumbs into the sides and crinkle it into something fearless and silly and unashamed. 

“I— I couldn’t sleep.” Stan’s voice, his singing voice to which swallows flock (”You know I could make Disney joke somewhere here,” Mike muses sometimes, and Stan, with his matching sweaters and binoculars and bad sixties playlists chock full with Genesis, never fails to falter and fall and laugh and laugh and _laugh)_ during laundry days, splinters and cracks. He fumbles at his cuffs and Mike takes his hand, almost eclipsing it entirely. Palm over knuckles, thawing out the bizarre cold holding Stan rigid before him. Stan meets his eyes in these— small, brief, _birdlike_ , flashes and Mike— suddenly,

suddenly he _knows_

(like he knows they’re due back at Salem in a month, back to their little farm on the town's edge with its fields infested by butterflies and perpetually freckled by dew; like he knows his father died thinking of him)

that the dream, half-dream, had been half-nightmare, yes, but more importantly _half-memory._ He knows and _remembers_ Stan’s shoulders against his chest, Stan’s head against his shoulder. A frail, miserable confession

_(“I can’t go into there, Mike. I can’t.”)_

_(There_ being that darkened, fetid space, _oh_ , that Mike knows in the itchy sleepless nights where Stan’s long-dreaming and the realisations of all his old fears, each _feather_ and prick of _teeth_ , strike him again and again like _coldlightning)_

meant for him only.

_He knows._

Stan’s uncertain fumbling’s taken on a definite rhythm, folding over and pressing the fabric of his cuffs into symmetrical triangles. “I’ll go back to bed, just wait awhile. I’ve got _shivers._ ” A mirthless laugh skates from him, light on the wit but deep in nervous unrest. Mike reassumes the place that comes so easy to him (that he remembers with summery warmth and fondness through the slow sickness of dread and terror chewing his gut like gum) around him, and when Stan’s mouth pops open, _It_ —It being _words_ , being _horror_ — falls from him, opening in his lap like, like—

(a book mildewed over, furred by horrible rot and slime)

(wings from the spine of some carnivorous, feathery Goliath— he _remembers_ , again like dragging details from a dream, that time when he’d felt fear acutely for the first time; that horrid time so many springs ago, _he remembers and)_

Well, Mike’s not quite sure he knows what it's like. But he says _It_  anyways, very quietly. “Did you have a nightmare?”

 _Did you remember something, Stanley?_ The following silence seems to stretch beyond even their piece of colonial architecture and surrounding three-acre property, over all Richmond’s marshes and stretches of _empty_ (barren? No, no, un- _barren_ ; fertile, rather. _Barren-with-a-capital-B-like,_  rather) and of _lush_ , vanishing up the Virginia mountain ranges. In it Mike holds him, waiting— it’s a strange and hollow space, refusing to expand. “Stan?” he tries, and curves closer to Stan, fitting into him.  _Stanley, what is it, did you feel it?_ The dazzling feeling of having witnessed something desperately terrifying and subsequently bearing its seed within his chest takes root within him, _(I was pushed into the mud once,_ thinks Mike with a sort of clinical amazement, _mud all over, and mom hollered and)_ showing mercy only when Stan’s eyes flicker up up up and meet his.

They dart away just as abruptly, ringed, raccoon-like, in palpable unease; in a second Stan’s face is pale, peaked, not scared but sharpened with a vexation Mike sometimes thinks only Stan is privy to— Stan and sometimes him. Mostly only Stan.  _“No!”_ he exclaims, wincing almost immediately at the harsh suddenness-sudden harshness of his voice in the cool calm _(clammy?)_ dim. “I didn’t,” he amends. “Well. I _didn’t_. It was more—”

He takes his fingers from his mutilated cuff as if waiting for Mike to chase them into his, and Mike complies, squeezing gently, prompting. With Late-night Stan and Sullen Stan, _Scared_ Stan, even, he’s familiar and friendly, but with this Stan (this Stan glaring moodily into his hands as if he can vanish into the spaces between his tangled fingers, a sort of reverse birth or even total surrender) he treads carefully. “I _knew_ something,” he tells Mike and his voice quivers and Mike knows (again with shock) that he knows _too_. In that moment the feeling, the horridly cold crawl of _It_ is an itch, a tangible weight

 _(because,_ Mike thinks slowly, unwillingly, _even light has weight and the cold, well that’s just the bad insulation, and the creaking, that’s just the house wilting from the heat of the night before, but the feeling, christ, the_ feeling _of_ It _, that’s different, that’s inexplicable and strange and_ un-Stanlike)

(And he muses, _oh, I understand. Oh, Stanley, I_ understand.)

from which he wants to shy, or laugh at. But he’d never laugh at Stan

(certainly not this early in the morning when the both of them are still numb with sleep and— dreaming. God, night-terrors made for such an _awful_ alarm clock)

and he’s _sick_ (with a slippery gut-feel that seems to scratch and pull at the inside of him, all of him, as if _chewing_ at his innards) of even the idea of shying away, so he pulls them closer. Stan inspects their hands, swallowing, knuckling the bags under his eyes with a loose fist. Mike knows the creases in his otherwise immaculately flat shirt, the crinkles at the corners of his unsmiling mouth and eyes, to be of indignation, _not_ fear; he recognises the crack in his voice as a fissure born of _offence_ , _not_ fear. Mike _knows_ Stan like he knows the grainy feel of fresh-tilled dirt in between his fingers, like he knows the earth and the good it can do any man. If prompted he could rattle off the numbers of Stan’s crow’s feet and spots of sunburn as easily as he counts the books lined up neatly in his library, the treats Chipsy’s allowed per day, the privets outside their front fence.

He could and could and _could_ , he could do all of those things, he could even (and this makes him smile but solemnly, the power of the _Could_ alone a lead weight on his mood) slide a palm into Stanley’s back and ease all the worry from him and waltz him back to bed, but instead—

Instead he settles at Stan’s side (the lounger teetering weakly under their combined weight) and squeezes his hand again, and it’s enough, and it somehow in their shared language of Hanlon and Uris says all he wants to say, and all the fretting— _reticent_ — _stiffness_ leaves Stan in a rush. He crumples into Mike, airless. 

“It was like for a moment I woke up and saw something I didn’t like and it dragged all the sleep out of me and I ended up here, is all. It wasn’t a bad dream, not really. I don’t think it was.” The terseness of his tone's gone, leaving in its wake his customarily wry birdsong lilt. Mike yawns, suddenly pleasantly drowsy.

“I wouldn’t’ve thought my face was that much of a shocker,” he remarks with sleepy amusement, pushing the parameters of what’s acceptable, of what Stan’s able to take so early, (so tired, so worn-out and bedraggled and _tense)_ and Stan laughs, somehow wildly in bright gales and raggedly at once.

“I just _knew_ something. It’s nothing.”

“Or you had a nightmare.” _Or you remembered a memory and it didn’t do you any good, did it?_ Mike figures for what it’s worth, it hadn’t done him too well either. The acrid, _specific_ smell of brass from that one July afternoon it seems a thousand years ago strikes him and for a moment he finds himself dry-mouthed and silenced again, blinking against imaginary sunlight far too bright even for summer. Stan chuckles, a dry, self-deprecatory sound Mike muffles with their ever-increasing proximity.

“Or I had a nightmare,” he agrees. “One hell of a nightmare, huh?” There’s anger there, weary and affronted. He blinks up at Mike and Mike blinks back. _(What a strange morning this’s been._ ) “Don’t tell me I sound like a loony— I do sound like a loony, don’t I? Don’t tell me, Mike. I know, believe me. I do.” 

“You know I’d never, Stan. You sound like you got about an hour of sleep last night.” And, well. He sort of had. When Stan relaxes (and it _hurts_ , it _does_ , to see him so tense, so _tight_ with exasperation and infuriation and that nameless terror strangely gummy between Mike’s teeth) he adds in a solemn voice (a _Voice)_ , “I’d— never _dare_ ," (The _I'd_ pronounced as a clumsy drawling _ayee'd)_ "You know I wuddn't.” It’s inexpert but it does the job. Stan smiles. 

“ _God_.”

“Yup.” Then: “I had a nightmare. If you’d wanted to know.” 

Silence. “If I'd wanted,” repeats Stan, very slowly.” When Mike’d been trying to take his hand, Stan'd turned a little further from him and crossed his calves together uncertainly, like a boy and child. “Sure, I wanted to know.” His eyes find in quick sharp glances Mike’s slender fingers, examining or appreciating the crests of his knuckles, the uniform callouses over the heels of his palms. Mike nudges him and he erupts in a bashful rush, laughter a hoarse titter of desert-dry throats and restless slumber. “God, I’m _tired_. How’s your book coming along?” 

—The hitch that suggests he’d’ve liked to say _I’m tired, I’m so tired and I hate it and I hated_ that _and I’m glad it’s over but did you really feel that, Mike, did you? Did you feel_  It? _Tell me you didn’t_  flops like a dead fish over the careful carelessness in the inquiry but Mike only raises an inquisitive eyebrow and turns to the slowly rising sun in the distance, split in two and two and two again by the polished windowpanes. “You know it’s not even six.”

The glum air between them wilts in the face of Stan’s thin smile, washed out in newly pinkish light. Stan’s thigh nudges his. “You know how it goes. Gets the worm.”

“What?”

“The early bird gets the worm, Mike.” He sounds faintly melancholy, displeased by having had dragged the both of them awake so early, but, still, his book? Mike thinks of his manuscripts lounging in the crannies of his bookcase and desk, less educational than nostalgic; less the continuous narrative needed for a book and more a stilted _jumble_ of anecdotes of— _what_ , exactly? He’d found himself inexplicably bound to it somewhere in his twenties, not to pursue the well-documented Hanlon passion for history, no; not even for the purpose of education or enlightenment, or even to relieve the occasional stretches of boredom that comfortable living was fraught with. Instead, he’d found himself drawn as if by a supernatural _(alien)_ force to the _idea_ of it, not as a book of history or even of _warning_ but of—

 _Remembrance_. 

(And almost fuck all happens in Richmond and Salem combined, but even just sitting and writing about nothing —juries desegregated in ‘63, _good for them,_ and the 70s’ science museum was doing well, too, and _that_ couldn’t do any harm— feels better than wasting about,)

(sitting pretty, sitting like a _duck_ for the next six or seven years—)

 _(seven years ‘til what?)  
__(’til a bullet found its head,_ his _head, of course, and killed him dead)_

(—and atrophying, even.)

There are parts of Mike that _tease_ , and tell him in the sinisterly gloomy early mornings (mornings like _this_ one, he supposes, and again his mood sobers abruptly) he should be writing _something_ else, _somewhere_ else, or maybe he shouldn’t, and anyways, why should he try? Why write at _all?_

_Because I love to. Because_

(and a shaft of sunlight spears their big bay window through the half-drawn curtain, painfully _dazzling_ , hissing:  _YOU’LL DIE, MIKEY,)_

_someone has to do it._

_(YOU’LL DIE IF YOU TRY)_

_Because I was put here to do something. Because Salem and Richmond and taking the sheep around and picking apples is all well and good, but I’ll go berserk just sitting here, and so will Stan if he has to drag me along with him to peer at birds each time he goes._

Again, that crawling sensation of _other_ , the cruelly unceasing _It_ , seizes him. Stan shakes his head, locks of his hair tickling Mike’s cheek; they had, unwittingly, straightened into the light to watch the sun. “Lord, that book. What’re you going to call it? I’m an advocate for _Arson Up the East Coast Through the Sixties_ , that okey-dokey with you?”

He’s smiling, teasing. But really, Mike probably will, just for him, because it’ll make Stan laugh in his rowdy, unexpected way when the post brings by the first couple of copies, and, well, crime and grotesquery _sell_ and sell well _._   _That's bloodthirsty, isn't it? What does that say about all of us?_ _Is it my job to even think that?_ Then: _of course it is._ The acknowledgement and then acceptance of that is a strange comfort. Mike wiggles out a numbing leg, cringing at the tingling wave that sweeps through him from the toes. “Reade’ll like that.”

Stan heaves laughter that thrums through them and at once the keen-edged light dims, yielding unwillingly. Reade’s their postman, a good guy for sure, who to his credit had offered only a low whistle and a gap-toothed smile when they’d showed up on the doorstep for the first time, stung by the Virginia air, unaware that they’d be staying for the better part of six years. _Aren’t you two a coupla persons of int’rest? Aren’t you two_ something?

What an odd _(queer,_ Reade had said but not maliciously. _What a queer coupla guys!)_ pair they’d made, careful not to push it, wrought and weathered  _anxious_  by experience and by odd half-dreams. What an odd pair they make still.

 _Oh, Mike,_ says Stan’s slow, blinking gaze when he turns it on Mike again, _I’m all for the nuthouse now. Oh, Mike. I am fucking exhausted_. 

* * *

So, they make breakfast. 

In the past decade or so they’ve patented themselves a formula for breakfast, a recipe for convenience and relative lack of stress, which entails the following: if pancakes are to be had, Mike minds them; if sandwiches, Stan, but only because the first few times Mike’d try to offer him one of his, he’d looked as if he’d been about to pass the fuck out at the sheer offence of combining peanut butter and onions, or strawberries and manchego, or whatever other unearthly combination’d struck Mike’s fancy that day. (”My  _god,_ Mike, what is that?” “Kosher, methinks. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, Stan,”) Chipsy must be kept in her room, or a room at least, ‘til food is on tables and in her bowl. Feeding bread scraps to the pigs must only be done in cases of emergency.

Now, Mike presides over a full skillet of perfectly circular pancakes, comforted by their slight sizzle as Stan slides a mug of steeping tea across the top of their polished oak table. He’s humming away to himself (some Talking Heads by the sound of it) under his breath, bathed in warming light. Reassured, Mike flips a pancake, rubbing away the flecks of oil when they're spat onto his bare forearms.

He rarely feels as— (What? Warned, scared, _intimidated?)_ wary as this, the ordinarily hot back of his neck cooled by simultaneous anticipation and dread when he reaches up to rub it with his palm. In brief moments he sees in the shapeless brown crusts of the half-burnt pancakes the outlines of _feathers_ ; sometimes, in the oily flotsam drifting to the edges of the pan, red-lined _grins_ drawing to mind the jumpy calliopean hop-skip tunes of the circus that soon fade into the hiss-and-spit of oil. 

Stan pipes up with a jaunty, “That’s the smell of burning pancakes, isn’t it?”

“No, never.” Then, after a moment of deliberation: (they _are_ pretty scorched for pancakes; they’d be alright for their fireplace, though) “They look okay. I think things are okay burnt sometimes, Stan.”

“Put that in your book, why don’t you?” is the responding quip. Mike smiles, careful to shut the stove off, and they sit opposite each other, eating in relative silence as dawn breaks over the horizon and into Stan’s haggard-looking cheeks and temples from which Mike absentmindedly brushes stray curls of hair. He reasons that this is another shared secrecy: hunched over the table, heads near touching, there’s _togetherness._

(In the end, through all the _figuring_ and the _feeling_ and the ominous _knowing_ , there’s only the fact that he’s known no greater intimacy than that which he does in these early mornings where he can’t tell where either of them end or begin.)

Their plates stay separate ‘til Stan’s fork darts out (” _Slips_ ,” he intones to Mike’s questioning look, the whites of his eyes indistinguishable from the bags underneath in the rosy vermillion of the new day) for a mouthful of Mike’s pancake, splitting the unforgivably ugly red-lipped leer lurking there to grin up at Mike. There’s a moment of quiet as Mike looks him over, and then suddenly they’re sparring madly over cutlery, the unnatural cold that’d come for them in the night slipped from their shoulders to the floor and discarded; drawn immediately into the shadows that slip and shy from the waking sun.

 _I’d do almost anything to keep it down there,_ thinks Mike almost ferociously, and accidentally flips a forkful of pancake into Stan’s cheek, from which it drops with a slight wet slap. Stan bites his lip.

“I’m too old for this,” he says.

He is thirty-one— in fact, they both are. Come March, Mike will be thirty-two and decrepit, nowhere close to finishing his first draft, and that's alright, just okey-dokey, just fantastic. He nabs another mouthful from the lip of Stan's plate. “Really? Sometimes I think I feel just like a kid again.”

And, plain and simple, he does. Not always enjoyably so.

But that doesn’t matter. Stan examines, admires him in comfortable silence. Mike holds it for all of five seconds before they yield shaking with quiet, shuddery, laughter.

_No greater intimacy._

Again, he knows— he _knows (like he'd known It)_  everything’s going to be okay, just fantastic, just fine so long as they're together.

* * *

They wake Chipsy with their clamour when Stan almost falls asleep carrying their dishes to the sink, letting them slip with an almighty _CRASH-BANG_ that draws from him an aggrieved sigh and from Mike a harmlessly brief peal of laughter. Afterwards, Mike rubs around her ears and lets Stan feed her, almost tripping over her twice. 

Afterwards, they sit on the steps of their backdoor porch, her little body sunken into both their laps, and peruse the three acres of prime Virginia real estate they’d chanced upon _(their_ three acres of good nurturing land) with familiarity and fondness, like Mike would the back of his hand, the sun over Stan’s nape, his sloped bookcase. There’s a northeasterly ruffling the kept-long grass that scarcely touches them, but Mike shuns it nevertheless with an arm around Stan’s shoulder and Stan’s head leaned against his. Stan's hands (gentle birder’s hands, un-calloused but prominently knuckled, smelling slightly of grass from a childhood spent playing outfield) drift from Mike’s nimble, worn-soft ones to his lap, pivoting ‘round on his wrist and cracking sleepy joints. 

Against his restlessness, Chipsy yips. Stan looks to the sky —to the heavens— and sighs heavily, but when he looks to Mike he’s smiling almost broadly,

 _in a way untouched by whatever’d troubled him so hotly in slumber, unmarred by the noisome_ It _of maggots found in apples and trees vacated of birds,_

and a weight lifts itself from Mike’s heart.

He rubs Stan’s shoulder, who taps his heel onto the mildewed boards of their steps, lashes fluttering. The Virginia air’s been good to him— either that or it’s something in the water. Better than whatever lurks in the— the midwest, _the far north,_ the space of _It_ (the hot terror of which he finds bothers him less and less with each passing second). _Too many dirtmen,_ (where dirtmen would later be elaborated on to mean _wifebeaters_ , to mean _vile_ men when Mike’d been six or seven or eight and able to understand these things) _too little salt in the earth, sewer-smell too thick and rank, rain too heavy_ , his father’d once reckoned. Or, Mike himself'd once reckoned. What Mike knows for certain from his childhood’s become a troubling slush, but before his heart can quicken (before his skin can tighten and his throat can parch, before the vicious viscous _gleeful_ _Knowing_ can descend upon him again) Stan sighs, the gentle sound muffled by the back of his hand.

Mike takes him by the side of his head and knits them up together. The trees rustle drowsily, winter-dead but embalmed in the same bubble of secrecy that settles over he and Stan like a fine soothing mist. Together, they’re warm, unbothered by the bracing chill, their open collars and sleepwear. _Together,_ Mike thinks, _this is how it’s meant to be, isn’t it?_

He’s weightless and unburdened and the half-dream is _gone,_ shed like an old skin or— or _plumage_ , as Stan breathes, “Maybe at least one of us should be in the nuthatch,”, looking to him with a quirk of the mouth asking, joking, teasing:  _and if it were me, you’d wait, wouldn’t you?_

Mike grins. _I’d wait forever, probably. You know it, don’t you?_ he wonders, and only realises he’s spoken aloud when Stan elbows him in the ribs, shaking his head, features bright. Upon their legs, Chipsy laps at Mike’s free hand sliding into Stan’s, ticked into vivacity by the creeping dandelions growing through the floorboards and brushing her ears.

From a little way off splutters the weak war-cry of an old truck engine. “That’ll be Reade,” remarks Stan, his mouth turned into Mike’s collarbones, “Mail really never fails. Maybe he’ll get an eyeful and put us both in the hatch.” 

 _Maybe._ (What had he been fretting over? What’d despaired him so thoroughly and so comprehensively? Despite himself Mike finds himself unable to pin it, _It_  down or even care.) “Chipsy wouldn’t let him. Wouldn’t you, girl?” 

To her credit, she barks encouragingly, turning her little body further into Stan’s lap. Laughing, Stan expels warm breath over them (them being Mike and Chipsy) both as he begins to pet her. There’s a hard intake of breath through his nose, an almighty yet precise, yet _timed_ , yet _measured_ sniff reminding Mike of rich girls from an age a life ago, and then suddenly all Stan's precise, timed, _measured_ adulthood is gone— Mike sees the precise moment in which it flees from him, and what a sight it is! Chipsy doesn’t protest when Stan crumples up underneath her to hide further into Mike, and neither does he. “It’s nice out here,” remarks Stan simply, and it sounds like _thank you,_ like _don’t go,_ like—  _you know I love you, Mike. You do. Do you?_

Who is Stan to ask anything of him, much less _don’t go_ when Mike’s bones ache with the wordless weight of that unfathomable stretch of horrors so long ago? Mike knows the answer to that; he's  _everything_ , or the only thing, or somehow both.

The wind whistles through the collar of his pyjama shirt. “It really is,” he agrees, and he hopes it sounds like, _I love you, Stanley. Put plainly, I always will._ Chipsy yawns melodramatically, just like herself, and Mike feels suddenly the certainty of being himself, of being in his own skin, of safety and repose. His hand, a swath of rich red sunlight, blends into Stan’s, neither of them shaking or fretting or tensing at all at the touch.

In half an hour they’ll forget entirely what drove them out of bed, the icy crawl of it (of _It)_ jostled and ripped from them by the merciful morning breeze. _(Half an hour, an hour, a day. A month or year. Maybe seven.)_ Mike holds Stan in the buttery dawn and counts down the moments to that which he knows but does not understand.

**Author's Note:**

> featuring: book timeline, even though this was partly inspired by one of the movie's deleted scenes and ben hanscom's newfound role. mike will always be the group's historian to me but the idea of how that'd play out if he'd left derry is pretty interesting to me!
> 
> how i figure the timeline to work in the case of this fic: they've been together since '63 and moved to jersey in '68 and then to virginia in '72 where they have two properties and a farm and a dog and everything is wonderful and okay including when they go back to derry to beat the shit out of that clown.


End file.
